The Nobel prize, and now knighthoods, awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov reaffirm the old adage that the simplest ideas are the best. For decades schoolchildren have been taught how graphite – the everyday stuff that provides the "lead" in your pencil – is made up of stacked sheets of carbon atoms, arranged in hexagonal rings; this pair of Russians based at the University of Manchester set out to do nothing more than pull out one sheet from the pile. Gloriously, they succeeded in doing so by tearing thin layers of graphite off a block with sticky tape, which they then folded over and pulled apart again and again so that the layers got ever thinner. OK, we admit that a few additional steps were required, but how marvellous that cutting-edge physics can be carried out in Blue Peter style, with a pencil and sticky-backed plastic. Once extracted from graphite, the one-atom wide planes are known as graphene, resembling chicken wire not only in structure but also in being somewhat rumpled and at the same time essentially flat. While the entertainment world goes mad for 3D, science is abuzz with the vast potential of this purely two-dimensional matter: it is 100 times stronger than steel, conducts electricity better than copper, and might one day displace silicon from the chip. To understand the why of graphene's magic you'd need to master brain-busting relativistic quantum mechanics. But the stuff itself, and the rough means of making it, are both gratifyingly straightforward.

• This article was amended on 4 January 2012. The original said Geim and Novoselov were awarded honorary knighthoods. This has been corrected.